[kpgalligan2]

I'm amazed and a bit dismayed by the general vibe in the comments.

I'll preface this with I don't know anything about Terraform, OpenTF, HashiCorp, etc. I couldn't even guess what Terraform is. I'm in mobile dev. However, I work on open source a lot and think about sustainability and revenue streams quite a bit.

I read the manifesto. I saw the "revert the license or we'll fork". What I didn't see is any form of trying to work with HashiCorp on their goals. It seems like very considerable resources have been pulled together to fork, but I didn't see the part where anything remotely like that level of effort and resources was on offer to HashiCorp to rethink the plan and come up with a better answer.

As I understand it (which is based off of some comments. See above about not knowing anything about this), a good chunk of the resources are actually from competitors. If true, it takes a lot of the sting out of the "HashiCorp are jerks" argument. I mean, I'm not saying they're not, but it's more like, "HashiCorp changed the license so they could push back on competition, so the competition forked the code". I don't really expect "right and wrong" from companies, or open source for that matter. But the spin and vibe feel a little misdirected.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Building up a community who contributes, then doing a rug pull, sucks. However, the "company does a risky thing and builds this awesome tool, then a bunch of others fast follow and exploit it" has become very common, and it is going to be a bad thing in the long run. You can say "We believe that the essential building blocks of the modern Internet, such as Linux, Kubernetes, and Terraform need to be truly open source", but to be fair, Terraform was not an essential building block until somebody built it.

As much as license rug-pulls damage user/community investment, fast-follow competition and the threat of forking will ensure far less investment in the very kind of open source everybody wants.

There is a financial sustainability problem involved in "big open source", and we are seeing the changes. In many ways, it simply has to happen. Going forward, I do hope new products like this start with a license that works rather than changing, as that is obviously not appreciated, but many devs reflexively avoid that kind of arrangement, even if it costs nothing to use.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. Hashicorp might be run psychopaths. I have no idea. In a general sense, though, the whole industry is going to need some new models. If it's just "fully open source or nothing!", there's a whole class of tools that won't exist. Building things is risky and expensive. I don't want to go back to when everything was closed source and needed a license, but open source without a reasonably protectable revenue model will definitely limit what gets built and why. And as we like to say, "if you're not the customer, maybe you're the product", or something like that :)

[fishnchips]

> offer to HashiCorp

Not sure about others but at Spacelift we tried to partner with Hashi, especially that ours is a higher level platform that connects various tools (eg. Ansible, Kubernetes, CloudFormation etc.), policies and processes, and it would not be hard to imagine how it could work with TFC/TFE's remote execution. The answer was a very loud and clear "NO".

[kpgalligan2]

Fair. Like I said, I don't know the context. I would include rebuffed attempts to work with Hashi as this kind of changes the situation. I run a company that does publish several libraries, and we are trying to figure out revenue models and things going forward. We don't really have anything in this category, but the general problem is a problem. A lot of companies tried to monetize open source, then the obvious risk happened, which is a lot of competition came in and just tried to monetize the same thing. Now some orgs are changing licenses, and people are upset. I can see both sides, and the industry does need to find some kind of middle path for reasons I mentioned in the post. The degree to which Hashi is a bad steward impacts the perception and response. If the license change didn't impact users and only competition, and Hashi had been trying to work with everybody to figure it out, then it would very much change how this looks. If they're a bunch of aholes, well, same but in the opposite direction.

[fishnchips]

Regardless of how they behaved towards us in the more distant and very recent past, I still hope there's a way out of that, and I will not be the one to start the war. It's not my desire to portray HashiCorp in a bad light, and I much prefer the perception to be shaped by what we can and will accomplish as OpenTF.

[pm90]

> fair, Terraform was not an essential building block until somebody built it.

If terraform wasn’t available and wasn’t oss, its very likely that a competitor would have enjoyed the success and network benefits that were essential to its success and ubiquity.

Perhaps people don’t remember but not long ago there were many IaC tools to choose from, and it was a matter of taste as to which tool was adopted by a company. Chef, Ansible, Salt and a few others, all had pretty decent support as building blocks for infrastructure. Then terraform came along and was widely adopted, not just because it was better but also because it was oss (like its competitors).

Now that its won, Hashi feels comfortable to pull the rug and change the license.

Regardless of what the competitors think or do, this is a very unethical move from Hashicorp. I really want openTF and other clones to succeed and for Hashi to die. At the very least they should never again be trusted as good OSS stewards and any new product they come up with should be treated with scorn.

Which reminds me… when was the last time they built anything? Seems like all their effort is focused on commercialization. Which is…fine, they are a public company after all. They’re just not the same institution that they used to be. Just the name is same, and that is really fucked up.

[kpgalligan2]

> If terraform wasn’t available and wasn’t oss, its very likely that a competitor would have enjoyed the success and network benefits that were essential to its success and ubiquity.

Of course, but then would also have "enjoyed" the competition that didn't need to invest resources to build the thing.

> Now that its won, Hashi feels comfortable to pull the rug and change the license.

Not saying you're wrong. I'm saying the industry needs a better model for open source investment. The "tough shit, making money is your problem" view is not great, but the "open source until we're essential, then rug pull" is also terrible.